About Unified Communications Client API

  • Article

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With Microsoft Unified Communications Client API, application developers create applications that integrate multimodal real-time Unified Communications within or across network boundaries. The resulting application can help position the personal computer as the center for home or business communications in real time.

With Unified Communications Client 1.0 SDK, custom clients can be deployed to interoperate with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. In addition, a custom client you create with Unified Communications Client API can interact with remote users of Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2.

With the Unified Communications application the user can:

  • Make audio and video calls, including computer-to-computer, computer-to-phone, and phone-to-phone calls.
  • Organize or join a meeting with a group of users.
  • Collaborate with each other through instant messaging (IM).

These activities occur regardless of the users' geographic location.

Unified Communications Client API provides a flexible publication and subscription framework for distributing and accessing presence and other user information. The presence information provides a user with knowledge of the availability and capability of the user's contacts in real time, which helps the user make an informed decision as to if, when, and how to communicate with a contact. For example, a user can choose to send an e-mail message, instead of placing a voice call, to a contact that is shown to be in a meeting. Similarly, a user can have incoming calls routed to a home number or to voice mail. A user can also maintain privacy by blocking callers from accessing presence information.

Another example of real-time Unified Communications is a business application with a corporate-deployed presence service that tracks traveling field agents. With presence information, headquarters can locate the field agents and maintain contact with voice and video sessions. Calls placed through a computer with presence information can minimize missed calls.

In This Section

  • Terminology
    Lists Unified Communications Client API terminology.
  • API Overview
    Introduces Unified Communications Client API including Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-signaling stack, Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)-based media stack, and a COM-based API layer.
  • API Applications
    Discusses the types of Unified Communications Client API applications for real-time communication and collaboration and summarizes basic application tasks according to functional categories.
  • API Object Models
    Describes COM-based Unified Communications Client API, including the naming convention, object model, and event model.

See Also

Reference

Microsoft.Office.Interop.UccApi

Concepts

Using Unified Communications Client API